The Inner Reality

“All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.” - Ansel Adams

A debate has been doing the rounds recently in the landscape photography community about how much it is permissible to clone out or remove from an image before we make it “fake” or “inauthentic”. This is actually a very old debate, but one that has become especially pressing as we enter the era of photo-realistic AI-generated images and AI tools that allow us to remove or add elements more or less at will. Such things as people, telephone wires, or entire skies can be eliminated or replaced with the click of a button.

But is doing any of this ethical? If we think of ourselves as landscape photographers can we clone out, say, power lines, and still honour our creative goals with integrity and authenticity?

This is a big question with many interlocking aspects. Too big, in fact, to cover in a single blog entry. It raises many questions about the nature and the goal(s) of landscape photography, the nature of authenticity, and how the decisions we make, both in the field and in post-processing, affect the relationship between the final image we present to the world and what we ordinarily – perhaps naively – take to be “reality”.

In this blog, I’m going to focus on the more metaphysical issues than the ethical: Supposing that we have some duty to be “true to reality”, what do we mean by “reality” in the first place?

We ordinarily suppose that when we open our eyes and look out at the world, what we experience is, to a first approximation, roughly how things really are. But philosophers and scientists have, for centuries, poured significant scorn on this idea – a view often referred to (non-pejoratively) as “naïve realism”.

Pausing for a moment reveals why naïve realism is almost certainly mistaken. Take, for example, colour. We humans normally see the world in colour, but the colours we experience and might naively assume to be part of reality are far from that. After all, what we think of as light is, according to science, simply that narrow band of electromagnetic radiation that has an effect on our visual systems. The rest of the electromagnetic spectrum – which is no less a part of external reality – is not visually experienced by us and, unless we take special steps to make it so, such as with infrared photography, does not end up represented in our images. So, to begin with, the vast majority of “external reality” is excluded from our image before we even press the shutter.

But the problem goes deeper. Even within the visible spectrum there is nothing “out there” in the external world that physicists would recognize as something “red”, or “green” or “blue”, etc. As physicists describe external reality, all light has a frequency (or wavelength), an amplitude, and (sometimes) a polarization. That’s basically it. Physicists can give a complete description of light without ever mentioning colours. Colours as we experience them are essentially nothing but the effects on us of electromagnetic radiation; the external reality that causes our experience is not itself coloured in any way.

Making matters even worse, we can’t even correlate particular wavelengths of light to particular experienced colours, because the colours we experience are hugely dependent on context, not just the wavelengths of light. Yes, people talk about, for example, light of 560-590nm as “yellow” light, but this simply associates a particular wavelength with a particular named colour experience that most people have most of the time under normal conditions. The fact is that exactly the same wavelength of light will be experienced as a very different colour if it is emitted from an area that we interpret to be in shadow rather than direct light. Similarly, we will experience different wavelengths of light as the same colour, depending on our interpretation of the context.

In the case of images on a computer screen the problem is even more obvious, since what we experience as yellow is in fact the combination of red and green pixels of similar intensity in the absence of the blue pixel.

The point of noting all this is that it reminds us of something really important when doing photography: the “reality” we may be seeking to express in our images and the ground against which some images might be judged as “fake”, is — as the photographer Guy Tal calls it, borrowing from writer Barry Lopez — an interior landscape, not an exterior one. It is not the world “out there” that we are trying to express through our images, but the world “in here”, and all that begins with our experience of the scene before us. It is in relation to that inner reality that our images need to be judged, and to that inner reality that our creative vision needs to be faithful.